Scandal spurs hope for reforms

Op-Ed from The State Journal-Register, 4/8/02

EVERYONE KNEW that Illinois had to be dragged kicking and screaming into enacting reforms that supposedly banned such practices as pressuring state workers to work on or donate to campaigns or using state equipment or taxes on campaigns in any way.

But in reality, these laws were treated as ones that could be bent to a certain extent, like speed limits and those pesky tax laws that require you to 'fess up to winning the office NCAA pool. As long as state workers didn't do something glaringly obvious, there was a kind of a gentleman's agreement in Illinois that no one was going to make a federal case out of it.

Except, as it turned out, the feds.

The real shock last week was not the long-awaited indictments of Scott Fawell, former chief of staff to Gov. George Ryan, top campaign aide Richard Juliano or even the less-expected indictment of the Citizens for George Ryan campaign fund. The surprise was that the indictments had come down at the hands of a GOP-appointed federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald.

ONE THING we really aren't used to in these parts are Republican appointees who go after Republicans. But nothing has restored our faith in the justice system as much in a long time.

We can hope that one of the longest lasting repercussions of this case will be renewed zeal in undertaking serious reform both of campaign finance and campaign practices.

We can hope that the allegations that a campaign donor treated Fawell to lavish trips, complete with prostitutes, will revive stalled efforts to enforce the state's gift-ban act. We can hope outraged state employees will fight to ban the hiring of future campaign donors for short-term, do-nothing jobs strictly to boost state pension benefits.

We can't help but notice Ryan has in turn rewarded Fawell with a similarly cushy "exposition authority" post paying $195,000 a year, more than Ryan himself makes as governor. That kind of political payoff is quite legal, but it's more than the taxpayers of Illinois should have to stand for, especially given the current state of the budget.

FOR OUR PART, we'd like to thank the secretary of state whistleblowers who were fired, transferred and harassed for even attempting to bring the campaign abuses to light. It took years for driver's license facility employees Tammy Raynor and Tony Berlin to get anyone to take seriously their evidence that driver's licenses were being sold for bribes in the McCook facility virtually as openly as hot dogs at Wrigley Field. It has taken four years and 42 convictions to prove that the bribe-taking was not isolated to a few crooked employees, but widespread and accepted as a way for employees to come up with their share of the Ryan campaign war chest.

We'd also like to thank former secretary of state investigator Russell Sonneveld, who had the courage to speak up when longtime Ryan crony Dean Bauer attempted to block his efforts to prove the truck driver involved in the Wisconsin accident that killed the six Willis children received his license fraudulently.

The Willis tragedy is a haunting reminder that this was not just Illinois officials playing politics as usual. This was about fraudulently licensing people to use semis as lethal weapons on the nation's highways in return for money to elect George Ryan and to enrich a handful of his top staffers and campaign donors.

If we can't separate the business of government from the way we conduct election campaigns after a scandal this devastating, we never will.